The University of California Encoded Archival
Description Project (UC-EAD)

Charlotte B. Brown
UC-EAD Project Manager, Assistant Head for Special Collections and
University Archivist
University of California, Los Angeles

The Encoded Archival Description (EAD), developed by a research and
development team at the University of California, Berkeley, is emerging as
the national standard for the encoding of archival finding aids in
electronic format. The University of California EAD Project (UC-EAD) is:

developing an implementation toolkit to facilitate and standardize EAD
implementation throughout the nine University of California campuses;

building a union database of the encoded finding aids;

creating a broad-based University of California constituency to test,
evaluate, and establish the EAD as the foundation of the UC digital
library for archival materials.

The UC-EAD Project, a two year effort, commenced in October 1996 when the
nine University of California campuses received preliminary funding from
the UC Office of the President. Though the UC project is only at the four
month mark (as of January 1997), the project's methodology and products
are based upon work carried out by the 1993-1995 Berkeley Finding Aid
Project and subsequently carried out by the Society of American Archivists
(SAA), the Research Libraries Group (RLG), the Council on Library
Resources (CLR) and individual archival repositories at Duke University,
the University of Virginia, Stanford University, and Yale University, to
name a few.

What makes the UC-EAD project unique among past and ongoing EAD efforts is
the establishment of a union database of finding aids, finding aids that
are presented in a consistent format and keyword searchable across
repositories.

To state the obvious: the public service implications for facilitated
intellectual access to primary source archival and manuscript materials
located in the nine UC repositories will be substantial. The impact that
the UC-EAD will have upon scholarly communication, given the richness and
significance of the primary source holdings administered by the UC
repositories, is another consideration.